Organizing Around Processes
by Ken Black
Organize around our processes? How do we go about it? What are the processes that add value? What is each process expected to accomplish or what are the requirements? How should they be integrated?
Once these questions can be answered, ability to organize around our processes becomes feasible.
Organizing around processes has proven to be more difficult than it sounds. Processes are intertwined and interdependent. The individual processes and the integrated set must both be kept in focus.
The challenge is to determine what the value-added processes are and how they can best be integrated.
To define a process begins with specifying the requirements for what that process must accomplish.
Management plans, one per process, serve that purpose. There is a matrix of management plans.
Once the requirements are known, procedures must be established which describe how to achieve those requirements.
Each management plan should be validated by a cross-functional team. Supporting procedures should be validated by creator and user teams.
Both management plans and supporting procedures, once validated, must be released and placed under formal change control.
Any organization that does not include CM on their list of value-added processes will have difficulty with integration. They will also have difficulty in achieving the desired level of overall efficiency.
Any information that can affect quality, schedule, safety, cost or any thing else that is important, must be subjected to the CM principles. Such information must be defined, validated, released and controlled. That is the purpose of CM. It is a behind-the-scenes process that makes all other processes work.
It is easy to recognize when an organizations CM process is working. An organization that operates in a corrective action mode has a CM process that is not working. Intervention resources must be added to rescue quality and schedules and anything else that is important.
Conversely, an organization that achieves consistent conformance has a good CM process. There is no need for intervention resources.
Organizational effectiveness can not be optimized until the various management plans are properly integrated and redundancies are eliminated.
We believe that the eventual role of CM will be to manage and communicate requirements. The eventual role of quality will be to verify conformance.
Quality plans and CM plans will eventually become one plan. The ability to organize around processes will be enhanced accordingly.
Institute of Configuration Management Scottsdale, AZ 85261-5656 Tel: (480) 998-8600 Fax: (480) 998-8923 Email: info@icmhq.com